Open Wide An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System

by Randy Lee Cutler

Available on Apple iBooks/iTunes 152 pages with more than 30 full colour illustrations ISBN: 978-0-9936283-0-6

This full colour enhanced e-book brings together writing, images and music that reflect a fascination for digestion as a metaphor for experience.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/open-wide/id825927680?mt=11%0Ahttps://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/open-wide/id825927680?mt=11%0A

What is offered is an imaginative and unusual collection of writing and images, an ABC primer that is an alphabet guide to bodily rhythms, chemical reactions and aesthetic transformations.

Table of Contents

As Above, So Below Bacteria Chiggers Dispatch Embodiment Flora GI tract

Hoarding Ingesting Johnny Appleseed Knots (and Folds) Lower Stratum Metaphor

Nectar Oligochaetology Peripatetic Quotations Ruminant Stomach Tract Urban renewal Void Wild mushrooms

XV (French Court of Louis of) XV You (me and Walter Benjamin) Zero-waste

9

Beautiful and endearing, each entry is a portrait of digestion from a different perspective with images that enigmatically enhance the subject’s unfolding.

Assembling her interests in writing, curating and contemporary art, Cutler has obsessively followed the looping trajectory of metabolism expanding the topic beyond its conventional implications.

Taken as a whole Open Wide: An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System offers a banquet of possibilities that range from visual art and cinema to ecology, biology and philosophical meditations.

Cc 
Chiggers

The second time I heard about chiggers was on an episode of The Simpsons. Marge, in a characteristically kind gesture offers bartender Moe a sweater. He replies, “What, does it have chiggers?” The first time I heard about chiggers was less funny. Returning to Vancouver, BC from a wedding in San Francisco in the summer of 2008, I grasped how my ruminations on digestion were becoming increasingly embodied. Driving north along the I-5

Ee 
Embodiment

I believe it is possible to experience Merleau-Ponty’s radical undoing of the traditional “mind-body

problem” simply by dropping the conviction that one’s mind is anything other than the body itself.[1]

— David Abram

What do we know from having, or better yet, being a body? How does my body with its myriad sensations and subjective experiences engender a kind of knowledge? Our daily movements, encounters and passages through space and time represent forms of consciousness through bodily awareness. Through perception and consumption, we take in and digest the world around us. And these experiences are in direct relation to

Gg 
GI tract

Digestion through a human gastro-intestinal (GI) tract takes 12 hours as it moves through more than approximately thirty feet of tissue. It begins in the mouth. With the smell or sight of food, salivary juices start to form in preparation for chewing and swallowing. Crushing the food increases its surface area contributing to an easier breakdown when swallowed. The chewed food (or bolus) moves down into the esophagus and on to the stomach.

Kk 
Knots (and Folds)


An organism is defined by endogenous folds, while inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are always determined from

without or by the surrounding environment. [1] 


— Giles Deleuze

The mouth opens the long and circuitous journey through the gastro-intestinal tract. Its passage involves a series of tubular twists and turns comprised of muscle, mucus and nerve tissue. The migration moves down the esophagus and into the stomach, a hollow muscular organ on the left side of the body. Operating as a temporary storage area, the stomach can unfurl to hold between 2 and 4

Cutler has collaborated with Celeste Martin, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Design and Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC to produce an innovative electronic publication that is situated at the threshold of conventional publishing. Martin has worked with the iBooks platform, usually adopted for textbook applications, to envision a multiple platform object that is part artist book, part research endeavor and part curated event.

Artists featured in the project are: Abbas Akhavan, Myron Campbell, Gaye Chan, John Cussans, Geoffrey Farmer, Kristina Fiedrich, Monique Fouquet, Allison Hrabluik, Elvira Hufschmid, Ingrid Koenig, Germaine Koh, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Liz Magor, Graham Meisner, Cindy Mochizuki, Damian Moppett, Ranu Mukherjee, Ryan Peter, Marina Roy, Margit Schild, and Holly Schmidt.

Open Wide An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System

by Randy Lee Cutler

Contact: rcutler@ecuad.ca Find us on Facebook and iTunes by searching: Open Wide Available on Apple iBooks/iTunes

mailto:rcutler@ecuad.cahttps://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/open-wide/id825927680?mt=11%0Ahttps://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/open-wide/id825927680?mt=11%0A